On Friday, the San Francisco (CA) Department of Public Health notified the California State Justice Department that a breach at Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) exposed personal information (PII) on hundreds of patients. In its letter to those impacted, the health department stated:

An investigation revealed that the unauthorized person accessed patient information between November 20, 2017 and December 9, 2017.

In a story on Bank Info Security, writer Jeremy Kirk explains a bit more about what “unauthorized person” means. Wrote Kirk:

Their (Nuance) investigation “determined that a former Nuance employee breached Nuance’s servers and accessed the personal information of thousands of individuals from several contracted clients, including the San Francisco Department of Public Health,” the department says.

Grim reminder that without visibility into who is accessing what, the chances of preventing a breach are slim to none. Actually – let’s call it none.

Malicious insider threats aren’t always just about theft of consumer and patient data. On Friday, the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia announced that a former CIA contractor pleaded guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, and to making false statements to investigators. According to the press release:

Reynaldo B. Regis, 53, of Fort Washington, Maryland, is a former employee of a government contractor who was assigned to the CIA between August 2006 and November 2016. During his time at the CIA, Regis conducted unauthorized searches in classified databases and copied classified information into personal notebooks, which he removed from his workspace at the CIA and stored in his home without authorization.

Check out our own threat analyst Katie Burnell in this interview with Sara Peters of Dark Reading. Recorded live while Katie was at the Interop show a couple weeks back, the clip emphasizes problems insiders cause and offers some guidance on how to best deal with them. Advance to 56:00 to watch and listen to Katie’s interview: IW News Dest

Tomorrow, we’ll be releasing our 2018 Insider Threat Intelligence Report. A comprehensive look at the frequency of insider threat incidents taking place across a wide range of industries located in several continents. This year, readers will have an opportunity to learn about which types of insider threats are happening most frequently as well as how things have changed since 2017.